I've been wanting to try Gentoo for some time, but always had to roll my eyes at the pages and pages of installation instructions. This time, however, I rolled up my sleeves and buckled down. Minutes later, I was on my way.

It seems that most of the problems came from an
unwillingness to read the documentation.
Gentoo is all about learning. especially a stage 1 install which serves almost no purpose than learning about how the system was built.

For installing KDE you should have read the Desktop guide and if you were expecting a functional workstation on your first install then using the stage3 tarball and the prebuild binary packages is highy recommanded.

Gentoo is really easy to use, once you have done the nescesary reading, because if anything goes wrong you will know how to fix it.

What was that supposed to be?
It all amounted to "I didn't read the documentation, I don't want to read the documentation, but I somehow feel the need to use a distro that requires reading documentation and I'll write an article about the experience."

I used Redhat, Debian (Woody), Mandrake, Suse, Slackware, Gentoo, and -- lately -- Ubuntu, but I am returning to Arch. Finding the best blend between control over the OS and work hours invested is hard, but with Arch I manage. Give it a try if you consider experimenting again.

"Finding the best blend between control over the OS and work hours invested is hard."

Most of the opinions here (including mine) can be distilled to a "madlib" version of that statement:

"I (like/dislike) the ___ (distro/OS) because it (gave/did not give) MY DESIRED BLEND of ___ and ___."

Try to apply it yourself to some of the comments here. This does not make those opinions "bad" AT ALL. If anything it is a testament to the great number of choices we have thanks to the countless number of talented developers working on the many distros/OSes.

One problem that seems to pop up in these conversations is hostility often generated between users and/or sub-communities by knocking down anything different from our own favorite distro/OS (often subtly). I find this a bit frustrating, as it often breaks down the conversation very, very quickly.

One alternative is to listen well to the reasons why the distro/OS is liked, and how the specific “blend” is achieved. A step further might be to try it out and spend a bit of time in the community, getting to know the tricks of that specific distro/OS. In either case, we end up with more knowledge than we started with. That is unless we "think" that we have nothing to learn

I agree with you. I have used some famous distribution like RedHat, Gentoo and Debian. I found out Arch is the best overall. The only drawback of Arch is that they haven't got enough packages as much as Debian and Gentoo. Although it is not for beginner, you don't need to be an Linux expert to install and use it. Certainly you learn a lot Linux from it.

I've tried prolly all the major distros, and I have to say I personally think gentoo is the best, as you have the most control over what you're installing of any of the systems I've used. Additionally, the author really should investigate portage. I think it would be very beneficial to him to realize that this article really was a big waste of time.

this sounds like my first shot at gentoo, when i figured i could get by skipping small sections of the install n get by, every install i followed after that was flawless, ya just have to MAKE SURE you know your system well, and read everything/be easy on use flags, its not really all that hard, just takes too long to maintain if your a bleeding edge junkie

"I go back online (with a wired connection; the wireless isn't working yet) with links and search for how to fix my mouse and install KDE. Searching the Gentoo site was difficult, but Google found the Gentoo instructions easily. Hmm, so much for that great Gentoo documentation I've been hearing about."

On the left column of Gentoo.org is a link marked Documentation: Main Index, Which leads to a page with Desktop Documentation which has a whole section on installing KDE.

"I thought I'd be smart and "emerge kde" to get up and running. Wrong! That's not quite right - you have to 'emerge kde-somethingorother' to get it done right."

Actually that was correct, and if you checked the KDE docs on the gentoo site you would have noticed that. Why you would think this is incorrect is mysterious..

---

Near the end of your "review" you rant about how long gentoo took to install when you decided to go with a stage 1 installation -- the longest possible method. You could have had gentoo up and running in 40 minutes as well if you opted to use their cd install.

Then you go into a rant about how much you love slackware.

---

All I gathered from your "review" was that you didn't read the documentation, you are upset that you choose the longest possible method to install gentoo and it took longer then 40 minutes, and that you like slackware.

I agree with the reviewer one hundred percent. Gentoo will never be an operating system for the masses. It will only be popular by a few hard core geeks who enjoy tinkering, have lots and lots of time, and are probably unemployed.
I am also amused by Microsoft hiring one of Gentoo's founders. Now windows will get even more bleeped up.
Its all good.

Something else that continues to amaze me is how often Gentoo is recommended for newbies in linux forums.
NEWBIES - do not try Gentoo.

I agree with the reviewer one hundred percent. Gentoo will never be an operating system for the masses. It will only be popular by a few hard core geeks who enjoy tinkering, have lots and lots of time, and are probably unemployed.
I am also amused by Microsoft hiring one of Gentoo's founders. Now windows will get even more bleeped up.
Its all good.

Something else that continues to amaze me is how often Gentoo is recommended for newbies in linux forums.
NEWBIES - do not try Gentoo.

I agree with the reviewer one hundred percent. Gentoo will never be an operating system for the masses. It will only be popular by a few hard core geeks who enjoy tinkering, have lots and lots of time, and are probably unemployed.
I am also amused by Microsoft hiring one of Gentoo's founders. Now windows will get even more bleeped up.
Its all good.

Something else that continues to amaze me is how often Gentoo is recommended for newbies in linux forums.
NEWBIES - do not try Gentoo.

I agree with the reviewer one hundred percent. Gentoo will never be an operating system for the masses. It will only be popular by a few hard core geeks who enjoy tinkering, have lots and lots of time, and are probably unemployed.
I am also amused by Microsoft hiring one of Gentoo's founders. Now windows will get even more bleeped up.
Its all good.

Something else that continues to amaze me is how often Gentoo is recommended for newbies in linux forums.
NEWBIES - do not try Gentoo.

I agree with the reviewer one hundred percent. Gentoo will never be an operating system for the masses. It will only be popular by a few hard core geeks who enjoy tinkering, have lots and lots of time, and are probably unemployed.
I am also amused by Microsoft hiring one of Gentoo's founders. Now windows will get even more bleeped up.
Its all good.

Something else that continues to amaze me is how often Gentoo is recommended for newbies in linux forums.
NEWBIES - do not try Gentoo.

im not a fan of gentoo (if you want ports use freebsd), but this guy is either blind or really really unobservant. the one and only time i ever tried gentoo i had zero problems installing it or finding documentation. in fact documentation is the one thing i like about gentoo.

I use Slackware on an older laptop, but I do give this guy credit for trying Gentoo. Gentoo just isn't a good fit for me as I don't have the time to spare by waiting for it to compile all the apps from scratch. I realize I don't have to do it that way, but if I were to use gentoo, I'd rather do it the way it was designed. So in Slack, I will install the base of the distro and utils, then download and compile the sources for the extra apps (provided they aren't too big), then make a tgz file and install it that way. Keeps the system somewhat clean, and uninstalling apps is a heck of a lot easier that way.

I really enjoy and respect the people that feel it is their duty to flame needlessly and non-ceasingly. Really, it is an inspiring display of maturity. It's what I love the most about the internet.

For those of you who feel that this review was pointless: it wasn't. There exists the possibility that this will serve a very good purpose. Believe it or not, there are still people out there who heard about Gentoo. It is entirely possible that this article could help ward off a weary noob from getting too far over his head too soon.

But lets all go back to flaming. After all, such behavior can only add to our distinguishment and public image as a community.

That wasn't a review. That was an "I love Slackware and not Gentoo" rant. Declare it as such. There were so many problems that could have been avoided by reading the well-written install document. Especially the "blocking" bit. The documentation (and the make.conf file) specifically say that unless you want to get your hands dirty, do NOT unmask the unstable packages. Tsk tsk. So much for a fair review.

Summary: Slackware user finds that the distribution he uses and he is familiar with takes him less time to set up and gives him less headaches than a new one, which he has to learn.

Of course you're not learning Linux, you're learning Gentoo, the same way you had to learn Slackware once. Or you're going to tell me your Slackware knowlege applies universally to any other Linux distro? Given the results, I'd really say no.

I switched from Slackware to Gentoo because I got sick of ./configure && make && make install. Even if any of the apt-like Slackware binary package managers had everything I wanted, I'd still be stuck with a build that's either bloated with features I'll never use or doesn't have some feature I want. USE flags are a good thing, Steve, and if you don't want to tweak them, the defaults are usually good. Also, any software that I install manually is independent of managed packages and requires manual updating.

Gentoo updates everthing, including core OS components, with one command. I'm running ~amd64 (the ~ means unstable) with hacks to expose even less stable software (xen and the latest GNOME), and of the >500 "packages" I have installed, only two currently fail to build from source. Another crashes occasionally unless I downgrade to the amd64 (stable) version.

Another complaint I have about Slackware is how easy it is to screw up dependencies during the installation. Gentoo has a rather slim base installation, and I only install dependencies as they're needed. With Slackware I always ended up installing libsomethingoranother because I was afraid programs would break if I didn't include it.

What I like about both Slackware and Gentoo is how they don't "customize" packages like GNOME on Fedora or Solaris, for example. They also don't provide non-standard GUI administration tools, so you're forced to learn "least common denominator" administration practices.

I agree that Gentoo can have more optimizations and you don't have to choose to do them. But then why choose Gentoo? Portage is supposed to be good but it didn't meet my expectations. Maybe my expectations were off but they were, nonetheless, my expectations.

And I don't mind doing ./configure; make; make install. I *feel* better about that. And it's standard.

I also agree about the Slackware installer, which is the biggest appeal of MiniSlack (or whatever it's called now) - it makes a minimum install without toasting dependencies. Then they went and made it a whole distro

That Gentoo doesn't do endless customizations on packages was the appeal for this Slacker. This usually keeps me away from "sanitized for your protection" distros like Fedora.

"I agree that Gentoo can have more optimizations and you don't have to choose to do them. But then why choose Gentoo?"

I do use them. I have my USE flags configured to exclude KDE and QT stuff, use GNOME and GTK as much as possible, build a minimalist seamonkey Mozilla, support everything but the kitchen sink with MPlayer, and more. What I originally meant was that you don't have to understand every USE flag to benefit from some of them.

I know what you mean. I was skeptical at first, but Portage is just managing the standard process. If anything, I'm more aware of --enable-blah and --disable-whatever options to ./configure after configuring my Gentoo USE flags because it's usually a direct mapping. USE="-esd" adds --disable-esd to the configure parameters, for example. But I can't reasonably maintain everything manually. Even with important packages like MPlayer I tend to miss updates and forget configure parameters doing things the standard way.

Portage actually allows pretty much arbitrary hacking without much trouble. I can mask packages that give me trouble, unmask packages if I want to live dangerously, and set per-package USE flags (to not build the Bittorrent GUI, for example). The /usr/local/portage overlay allows me to use unoffical ebuilds for alternative kernel sources, for example, and bump version numbers for things like reiser4progs that the Gentoo devs don't always update quickly enough. If I only want a minor change, it's no more difficult than compiling from source the standard way. I do it all the time with metacity. "emerge metacity", ^Z it before it starts building, change a line in src/display.c to get my desired focus behavior, and fg to resume building.

Thanks for the tip about MiniSlack. I'll keep it in mind for installations that I don't intend to update and want to work without too much trouble.

Your reply was very helpful and clear. I had set a few USE flags but I kept wondering if I had to, if I would be better with or without them, etc. The Gentoo docs seem to encourage them. But "can" and "should" are different, and I never sat down to test the difference (not being one to believe what I'm told).

Portage is more appealing the way you presented it. I might still give Gentoo a chance on an old 450GX server I've got sitting around, just for kicks. (even though it seems the Gentoo community-at-large thinks I'm an idiot) <grinning, laughing>

OT below here
MiniSlack is now called Zenwalk, by the way. They're starting to fork instead of staying more derivative, but it's still pretty good. The goal is "one app for one task," and they do a fair job at sticking to that. I'm not in love with XFCE (it's default) but I like it well enough and it's easy to use.

Zenwalk has also introduced a package manager, but I haven't tried it (yet). Slackware's lack of a package manager is actually a GOOD THING, in my opinion.

Another alternative or "basic Slackware" I've liked is Slax. It's a bootable, or "live CD," but you can install it to the hard drive easily enough. It has a "modules" feature that's actually pretty cool. Slax found much more hardware than Gentoo, and it fits on a mini cd (sorry, couldn't resist the dig)! It also has a lot of nifty boot options, like loading everything to RAM and loading the GUI by default (which is a pretty snazzy combo). Better, you can build an .ISO with those options pre-configured. I keep a Slax CD with me most of the time; it's infinitely handy.

Well - I use Gentoo for my main system. I'm not a fanboy/zealot of Gentoo though. I use Ubuntu on my laptop because I just wanted a Linux system quick and easy. (Actually - I would run FreeBSD on my laptop but for the fact that my sound card is apparently unsupported. Bummer.)

Anyway - in reading this review, it sounded to me like this guy fell in love with Slackware a long time ago. He is a Slackware fanboy/zealot and tries other distros just so he can poo on them. He learned a long time ago how to do things one way - the Slackware way. And now he's afraid to learn anything new.

It sounds like he wanted a distro that would install everything "out of the box" and "just work" without having to know anything about setting up the X Window System, or configuring anything. That's not Gentoo. I could have told him that ahead of time and saved him a lot of trouble. Gentoo is more for people who want to know how things work.

If he wants an out of the box experience that just works, that's cool. I have no problem with that. I don't think of less of people who want that experience. There are times, such with my laptop, where that's what I want as well. But I'm not going to try Linux From Scratch on my laptop and then write an article complaining about how I had to do all these "wacky" LSF-specific steps that don't export to other distros just to get Linux up and going.

As far as "What are these USE flags all about?" - I guess he has never compiled a program from source. When you compile from source, you have options to include or exclude different compile time options. For me personally, the USE flags are probably the single coolest thing about Gentoo. I don't believe I'm necessarily getting a performance boost, but I know I'm excluding a lot of stuff that I'll never use when I compile a program with certain USE flags enabled, and others disabled.

The USE flags are a simple short cut to compiling everything from source with certain options enabled/disabled. As far as it being a Gentoo-only solution, yeah - sort of, I guess. But if you've compiled source code before, you understand exactly what it's doing and you THANK GOD it's doing it. It saves you a lot of monotonous work that would otherwise go something like:

Or - use Gentoo and type "emerge <program>" to accomplish the same thing.

At the beginning of his article he told happy Gentoo users to go away. That's kind of funny. He should have took his own advice before ever trying Gentoo. As a Slackware zealot/fanboy, he should just use the One Thing he knows and be happy about it. Because until he's willing to actually learn something new, and actually take the time to read about something new, he's never going to be happy with another distro.

sounds like he wanted a distro that would install everything "out of the box" and "just work" without having to know anything about setting up the X Window System, or configuring anything. That's not Gentoo. I could have told him that ahead of time and saved him a lot of trouble. Gentoo is more for people who want to know how things work.

---Thats not Slackware either.... They guy is too used to how slackware works,, period

The back biters here are making no progress for Linux.
Just their childish egos. Grow up People.

This is the worst article I've read! I didn't even get past the first page because of the poor consturction and grammar.

OSnews editors: Make your writers read The Elements of Style. It is available for free at http://www.bartleby.com/141/. It's a classic and basic guide to writing.

Language is about communication. How can you express yourself clearly if you don't understand the basic rules of language? I'm trying to be a preachy grammar teacher, but you should have a minimum level of professionalism in your writing for the sake of the readers.

Sorry for the typo. I don't spell check message boards, unfortunately. I do proof read and spell check a billion times when I'm writing an article that thousands of people will read and form their own opinions on. I have, in fact, written for Linux Journal, Newsforge, and OSNews so I know what I'm talking about.

"Your points are contradictory. Slackware DOES apply to other distros, Gentoo does not. This is why I had problems with Gentoo. Very little in Slack is custom - most of it is straight "out of the box."

Which part of the Slackware package management system applies to RedHat, Debian, Arch, etc...?

Slackware isn't the gold standard for the way of doing things. Debian is pretty different from Slackware. RedHat is pretty different from Slackware. And both of those have a larger install base than Slack.

If you want "the one true way" to do thing, you should use FreeBSD bro. That's it's greatest strength in my opinion. FreeBSD isn't just a kernel, it's a complete system. If someone makes a custom distro based on FreeBSD and totally mucks up the way things are done, it would be a valid complaint to say that their way isn't the right way. But with Linux, that just isn't the case. There is no one right way because there is no single distro that dictates how things are done. Whether you like that or not is a matter of opinion.

The, what you call, Slackware way is the UNIX way. And the Slackware pkgtools are nothing but a binary package install-tool, which is more or less "cd / && tar zxf <package> && ./install.sh. Which, again, is more similar to the traditional UNIX way than most other package managers.

There are tons of Slackware features liek this which actually help to make your skills portable, and usually these features have a good reason, too.

Now, paraphrasing Steve, if you don't like Slackware, I AM HAPPY FOR YOU. Shoo. But have the decency to at least bring reasonable arguments to the discussion. Proven procedures (like the UNIX way) are indeed not necessarily the end-all of everything, but new procedures are not even proven.

I've already tried Mandrake(actual Mandriva), SuSe, slackware, freebsd and actually using Gentoo. My thoughts are, Mandrake, and Suse for beguining, learning linux. Slackware simple, and powerfull linux but we then start to understand what are conf files, and some other things that we need to do manually. Freebsd is good but lack of hardware support, total control, and we need to know a little of what we are doing.
Gentoo, we learn how linux works, it's not easy but gives you total control, and for god sake read the documentation, and stop saying i can do that or this...
Arch is also good, i've recently installed it to a friend of mine i have no idiea if it's good or not.
Gentoo maybe it's not to ordinary persons but now that i'm used to it i can't leave him, emerge myself!!
The speed boost is good...

BTW it is the first time I see a Linux user thinking and behaving just like any clueless Windows user(*) "Hey,things-are-not-exactly-as-I-am-accustomed to? Do I have to read DOCS? My god, this system sucks!" And he is a long time Slackware user, not a newbie using Mandriva from 2 months.

If this means something about the Linux user base, it means something bad. I hope Linux catches on by creating more clever and educated users, not by lowering itself to meet the mind of retarded.

(*)-I don't mean all Windows users are clueless or lusers. I mean the author of the article looks like a clueless one.
(**)-Full disclosure: I'm a Gentoo user.

Hmmm... This is not the first time I meet a slacker who acts this way. It is like they have found the silver bullet of distributions and then all other distributions should act the exact same way. Well this is not the case, is it. That is why I say RTFM!! This helps you iin understand how a system work wether it is RH, Debian, Gentoo or Slackware. I would never try a new system without reading the manual or find some documentation.
And a side note if something breakes the gentoo forums are the best for support. another good place for documentation is gentoo-wiki.com

I'm not really a Slackware "fanboy" - I just really like Linux. Really! I try distros not to break them down, but to really check them out, see what they're about, and form opinions about the state of Linux.

Slackware has its problems. In my OPINION, Gentoo introduced more problems than it fixed. And that's too bad. I *really* wanted to like Gentoo, I just didn't. Perhaps my expectations were set too high. I'll take that hit.

If you read the article, I *DID* RTFM - many of them - many times - I just didn't want to. Important difference. Which is why Linux on the desktop isn't going to go mainstream (or the ubiquitous "ready for the desktop") in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, or probably even after, unless some attitudes change. And that saddens me.

When you first fired up Firefox, did you first RTFM? Nope, not a damned one of you did. If you had to, you wouldn't have used it. It just worked. But if you want to about:config, you can (and many of you probably do).

But you condemn me for the same behavior with my OS?

Point made?

And I have learned quite a bit about editing my config files manually in Linux, thank you. I also learned to hack the registry in Windows. Doesn't mean that I'm better for it. It means that OSX still looks appealing to me (though I'd never pay for the hardware, and I may not have to with recent developments).

I also learned how to manually build a GUI in Java. What a painful lesson in tedium. Then I later did it by drag 'n drop and was thankful for it.

RE: other anonymous cowards: again, if you read OSNews' submission guidelines, you'll see that this is NOT just a news site - opinion pieces are welcome. And that's what this is.

<sigh>

To the intelligent, thoughful replies (i.e. not the guy who's entire, eruditic post was "idiot"), thanks. Even when you didn't agree, your replies were thoughtful and considerate. This is the Linux community I admire.

When you first fired up Firefox, did you first RTFM? Nope, not a damned one of you did. If you had to, you wouldn't have used it. It just worked. But if you want to about:config, you can (and many of you probably do).

i would have thought that gentoo was more of a threat to debian, but based on last 2 years of OSNews' editorial reactions, it appears that slackers make likely candidates for future gentoo ricers. why else would slack promoters have such an issue with gentoo?

personally, i dig gentoo. i've wasted a lot of time on it.. and have learned a lot in the process.

gentoo requires more initiative than shown by the author of this article.

"If you read the article, I *DID* RTFM - many of them - many times - I just didn't want to."

Again, your article shows that you clearly didn't. Or how else to explain your cluelessness?

And why on earth did you choose a distribution that requires reading documentation if you didn't want to? How stupid is that?

"Which is why Linux on the desktop isn't going to go mainstream (or the ubiquitous "ready for the desktop") in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, or probably even after, unless some attitudes change. And that saddens me."

Bohoh, that's so sad, but please don't cry honey.
So because there is a distribution that is clearly _not_ targeted at people who want something that works out of the box, Linux will not be a success on the desktop? Amazing logic, congratulations...

"But you condemn me for the same behavior with my OS?"

Yes, I do, because gentoo neither claims to be, nor is something that's supposed to work out of the box, but it's a meta-distribution that gives you a lot of control about your system and basically provides the tools to create your own system in the first place.
Now if you like me don't want or don't need this kind of control, but want something that simply works, simply use an other distribution, just like I do.

"Let's not all be a bunch of Luddites here and accept progress.

Point made?"
Yes, you clearly are an idiot! Gentoo has different goals and caters to a different crowed. Simply accept that there is no one size fits all solution and be done with it, fcs.

From the Gentoo site: "If the power, flexibility and speed of Gentoo Linux appeals to you, then we encourage you to give it a try."

I didn't get that this precluded "just works."

Also: The Gentoo philosophy is to allow this user to do what he or she wants to do, without getting in the way.

I didn't find this to be true at all. Gentoo did get in my way.

My final comment to this article, also from Gentoo's philosophy page, is sure to incite ire: When a tool is doing its job perfectly, you might not even be very aware of its presence, because it does not interfere and make its presence known, nor does it force you to interact with it when you don't want it to.

Hey, wasn't that last part exactly my point about Firefox? Who was it that said this wasn't a valid comparison?

I didn't want to interact with Gentoo as much as I had to. I did expect to learn a bit about Gentoo - and I did; I said I left a lot out of the article - it WAS over the course of three days that I fiddled with the OS - but I DID manage to get a lot of "non-goals" working on Gentoo, and I DID manage to learn a lot about Gentoo. I completely understood that Gentoo would be different than other OSs I've used. However, at every turn, I had to go back to the documentation, and it wasn't always so easy to find what I was looking for in the documentation.

Gentoo has to be easier to use - because of its very own, self-proclaimed philosophy of not getting in the way, not because I'm a Slackware user and have different expectations/experiences. Which is a point that I think I failed to convey to my readers. I'll work on it.

As some of you might know, I'm a longtime Gentoo user who is starting to move on. The reason I dove into Gentoo so early (spring 2002) and continued for so long is that it appeals to my basic philosophy on software: I prefer a system that makes it as easy as possible to get things working exactly the way I want over a system that make it extremely easy to get things working the way someone else wants. At the time, there was no simpler way to get a completely custom Linux installation. Debian would get in my way and had way too many distro-specific tools, and Slackware didn't have dependency support. My choice was between Slack and Gentoo, and I chose waiting for things to compile (usually nice -n 19 while doing other things) over fighting dependencies and not getting exactly what I wanted.

There were always three aspects of Gentoo I wasn't thrilled with: 1) lack of binary packages except in a few cases, 2) installing custom packages or unstable packages is complicated due to portage overlays and package.mask/unmask/keywords/provided being persistent, and 3) I could never figure out how to write ebuilds that work properly.

But lately, I've added a fourth gripe: that none of these issues are going to get any better. It's only downhill from here. Daniel Robbins' original vision, expressed in the unchanged philosophy page you quoted, has been largely ignored by the community in favor of this developing "Gentoo way." A commitment to supporting binary packages has somehow morphed into, we'll only support binary packages if they're provided by the upstream developers. A community with a great balance of gurus and newbies devolved into a cespool of "problems while trying to emerge -uavD world."

A distribution that, three years ago, I thought would evolve into a mother distribution to rival Debian, has produces a mere two commercial derivatives, both of which are rather anemic. It is and will always be a hobbyist distribution for people who crave control and have a bit of patience. It didn't have to be pigeon-holed into this niche, but the Gentoo community took pride in their elitism and ran with it.

Until recently, I hadn't found an exit strategy for leaving Gentoo. In fact, I'm writing this on a Gentoo laptop, and I have another Gentoo laptop at home. But I found what I'd been missing in Arch Linux. As others have mentioned in this thread and elsewhere, If you like aspects of Gentoo, Debian, and/or Slackware but neither is a perfect fit for you, then read this document:

The first part is an install guide, and the second part discusses how to configure, administer, and build packages for Arch Linux. Basically, it has the binary package management of Debian, with the simplicity and configurability of Slackware, and the source-based package customization of Gentoo rolled into one distribution. Arch can be summed up in one word: simple. It is simple regardless of how little or how much you wish to tinker or contribute.

Especially for the Slackers who don't take fondly to the "Gentoo Way," you might want to consider Arch, or possibly Rubix (which is another Pacman distribution with more of an explicit Slackware heritage). They might not have every package you need in the repositories, but there's a growing community repository, and it's incredibly easy to create and contribute your own package. It took me three years to understand how to write ebuilds that sort of work on my computer and no one else's, and under an hour to learn how to write a PKGBUILD that works perfectly.

If you don't want to write "A Slacker Tries His Hand at FreeBSD," then consider writing "A Slacker Tries His Hand at Arch."

I didn't want to interact with Gentoo as much as I had to. I did expect to learn a bit about Gentoo - and I did; I said I left a lot out of the article - it WAS over the course of three days that I fiddled with the OS - but I DID manage to get a lot of "non-goals" working on Gentoo, and I DID manage to learn a lot about Gentoo. I completely understood that Gentoo would be different than other OSs I've used. However, at every turn, I had to go back to the documentation, and it wasn't always so easy to find what I was looking for in the documentation.

Gentoo has to be easier to use - because of its very own, self-proclaimed philosophy of not getting in the way, not because I'm a Slackware user and have different expectations/experiences. Which is a point that I think I failed to convey to my readers. I'll work on it.

And now, THIS one is a rational, easy to understood argument. As a Gentoo user and not a zealot, I completely agree with you, as the very similar experience happened to me and sometimes happens to other Gentoo users as well.

Should your article end with such a point, you'd get A LOT MORE positive feedback. Insulting people is never considered nice, and to be honest, that's exactly what you did. So, my first reply was also not as nice as it could be. But after reading the above comment of yours I think I'll give you a +1 ;-)

No, not really. But I agree - progress is a good thing and things don't need to be as complicated as they were when things were less understood. For example, I have no desire to screw with IRQ settings on an ISA card ever again. Progress is good.

But you set out to use a Linux distro that is all about tweaking, customizing, getting under the proverbial hood, and so forth. Yet you expected it to "just work" without being required to read a few things? That's very naive don't you think? You want something like Ubuntu, not Gentoo.

And comparing a web browser to an entire Operating System isn't a realistic comparison.

I think one thing that can said about this article is that there are likely to be others who have this experience with Gentoo. Gentoo is not for everyone I guess. Though it is for far more people than is commonly assumed.

When you are habituated to any other OS, there are bound to be some challenges when using another one, even when moving from one distribution to another.

I always assumed that the frustration involved in this was something that, except for really glaring design flaws, writers would "filter" from their articles.

Guess I was wrong.

I don't have any problem with people having a bad opinion of Gentoo or anything else, but I have to ask what purpose this article served.

First off, installing Linux on any laptop is going to be a pain with a lot of distributions, this should be nothing that surprises anyone anymore, but there are some that are really getting quite good at it, I hear Ubuntu has, and apparently Slackware is good for this reviewer's needs on his laptop. However, mistake number one was expecting a distro like Gentoo, that you tailor to your needs, to simply "just work" out-of-the-box so to speak with his laptop's configuration. It's just not going to work.

Furthermore, many of the problems he had could be found simply by Googling for the specific hardware he was having an issue with. If I'm having a problem getting Twinview setup, or my mouse wheel working, I don't search Google for Gentoo-specific results, I search Google for all results because Gentoo runs Linux, therefore, solutions for other distributions as well tend to work great within Gentoo. This is really something I thought was a no-brainer, and I used to use Slackware primarily after I got sick of Mandrake 8.2 back when I started off. Then there's also the forums that apparently he completely ignored (Nevermind the left hand side of the main Gentoo website that has links to all the documentation he would ever need and more).

Emerging KDE is as simple as an emerge kde, I don't know what the reviewer was on but seriously, why does it work for me right now? emerge kde installs kde-base/kde-3.4.2 for me right now, which in turn installs all the required dependencies that make up a standard KDE desktop. If you wanted to, you could do emerge kde-meta, that's another option that I tend to use, myself, but still, it's not the default, and emerge kde simply works. What the heck is going on here? I didn't know there was blatant lying allowed in these articles, that they aren't checked for factuality. You can even go to packages.gentoo.org and see for yourself, the kde package is there. http://packages.gentoo.org/ebuilds/?kde-3.4.1 That's the kde that most people not delving into the unstable portage tree will encounter when doing emerge kde.

Seriously, this article reeks of flamebait, and I say that as a very serious supporter of Slackware, regardless of my not using it primarily for some time. I have played around with each and every new release though, and yes it is simpler to setup than Gentoo if you're inexperienced with Gentoo, but maintaining it is a far cry more difficult, even with checkinstall and swaret or slapt-get. I'm sorry, but I need to compile my packages with the support that I need, and it's a pain in the arse to do that by hand, I don't want to wrestle with the package manager Slackware uses anymore. Sorry for the long response but truth be told it would be longer if I felt people would read it at that length.

> You're making my point. This is why my (insert acquaintance here) doesn't use Linux but they DO use Firefox.

This wasn't to me, but ... talk about derailing a topic. So now instead of talking about how you probably had to read documentation when you first used Slackware 1.0 over a decade ago, or how you would be expected to read documentation for a distro like Gentoo even today, you want to spin the issue into why your acquaintances don't use Linux? Because ... ?

I wouldn't recommend that your acquaintances use Gentoo. I would suggest something like Ubuntu. And if they weren't willing to spend as much time learning how to use Ubuntu as they spent learning how to use Windows, I would then suggest they just stick with Windows and be content with the security problems of Windows and its spyware and viruses.

Go ahead ... spin this into yet something else that is totally irrelevant.

visit this link: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-216214.html it's for a Gentoo Distro called "Gentoo RR4" it is basically a pre-configured gentoo install, which you can emerge the entire system to update it afterwards. There is also a live DVD available for anyone who wants to do it the knoppix way, have a play, and then install from the DVD.

First you must see if Gentoo compiles properly. After you have tried a few times, you'll succeeds, perhaps...
Then a lot of stuff still doesn't work properly...
One silly example: firestarter: I had to compile it manually, then it was fine.

I also tried Slackware 10.2: everything worked out of the box, including sound: my soundcard is an absolute bitch. All you need to use Slack is a bit of experience gained with any distro.

I am very fond of Slackware. However Debian is much more accordind to my tastes.

"I know what you mean. I was skeptical at first, but Portage is just managing the standard process. If anything, I'm more aware of --enable-blah and --disable-whatever options to ./configure after configuring my Gentoo USE flags because it's usually a direct mapping. USE="-esd" adds --disable-esd to the configure parameters, for example."

I agree with this statement. I use to do a lot of "./configure ; make ; make install" type of installations myself. I knew the --enable and --disbale options where there, but I didn't realize the extent of their usefulness until I started using Gentoo. When manually compiling source before, I would usually just accept the defaults for a ./configure execution. Even if that meant compiling another source tarball that I wouldn't even end up using. Whereas if I had compiled with that option disabled, I wouldn't have even needed that dependency in the first place.

Back then, I just didn't understand the concepts as well as I thought I did. Once I started using Gentoo's USE flags, it all became much more clear.

When I type "emerge -pv mozilla-firefox" for example, I get an instant list of dependencies that mozilla-firefox will require. If I don't like the list, I can play with the USE flags to turn off stuff I know I'll never need and watch as the list of dependencies shrinks.

I can't agree with you more and I'm very glad you've posted this article!

I tried almost all distro's out there and I always get back to Slack somehow, it's the best!

I tried Gentoo several times, I think about 5 times spending a couple of days each time to built it, and I'm not too lazy to read documentation.

I followed the docs step by step, starting from stage1 the first time, starting from 3 the second time, but I never got it to work as smoothley as slack does.

I think Gentoo sucks, Gentoo ain't Linux it's just 'another' OS.
Same thing goes for Ubuntu, I think it sucks too, I've ran it for a couple of weeks and everything works but it's different, I don't feel good when working in it.

I'm so used to Slackware with Dropline Gnome (running slack 10.2 with DLG 2.12.0 atm)I'll always stick to it and never will try that shit gentoo again.

Please oh please tell me this is sarcastic. All distros that aren't slackware aren't linux. Yeah, whatever. They make me feel cheap and dirty inside. Whatever your smoking, its powerfull. By the way, thanks to the editors for posting a article that would obviously degrade into a flamefest, what are you trying to do, turn this into slashdot?

I can't agree with you more and I'm very glad you've posted this article!

I tried almost all distro's out there and I always get back to Slack somehow, it's the best!

I tried Gentoo several times, I think about 5 times spending a couple of days each time to built it, and I'm not too lazy to read documentation.

I followed the docs step by step, starting from stage1 the first time, starting from 3 the second time, but I never got it to work as smoothley as slack does.

I think Gentoo sucks, Gentoo ain't Linux it's just 'another' OS.
Same thing goes for Ubuntu, I think it sucks too, I've ran it for a couple of weeks and everything works but it's different, I don't feel good when working in it.

I'm so used to Slackware with Dropline Gnome (running slack 10.2 with DLG 2.12.0 atm)I'll always stick to it and never will try that shit gentoo again.

This isn't the first time I tried Gentoo, actually. It's the first time to got to USE Gentoo.

My first try was a networkless install, which failed because the documentation was wrong, and I didn't know enough about Gentoo to get past this step. I also ran into a documentation error in the install that prompted this opinion piece, but I booted to the CD again and was able to find and fix the problem. Gentoo's docs haven't been very helpful for me.

For the record, I don't think Gentoo sucks, I just didn't like it. Nor did I ever say that it sucked (nor did I hurl insults, for that matter). I need to make that clear. Similarly, I don't think babaganoush sucks, I just don't like it. But my mother always told me, "How do you know if you don't like it ..."

tryed gentoo about 2 years ago, then after a period of 1 year i blowed my laptop (graphic chip gone), then i installed slack, it was 9.2, it was pretty smooth, all were up to me, but i've managed to get things done.
after this period, about 5 months ago, i tryed gentoo again, 'cause the flavoured kernels, a tool for controlling the majors of programs, but it dosen't suite my needs well.
some programs are not up to date (rhythmbox), the portage is quite slow, and rebuilding for a -r? sounds quite silly to me.
now i'll go bak to slack for my laptop (a new one), or i'll try a rpm based distro.
i don't like gentoo, a waste of time for a minimum gain.

on the other hand there r some nice projects in the gentoo community, like initng or splashfb, but i prefer to port them in another distro then living with portage

Some people cannot read documentation no matter how well it is written. Gentoo is not for you so please don't write skewed reviews. I read docs, and I find gentoo the easiest distro to get running 100%. Other distros will take me 90% there faster but after that I am just stuck trying to tweak them. The Gentoo docs are almost cut and paste, basic knowledge required. Slackware rocks too (I am a slacker gone gentoo) but I got tired of patching and spending so much time doing what gentoo does natively with a few USE flags. This review does no one any good. It should be titled
Blind man movie reviews silent movie: Plot hard to follow...

To be a gentoo member you need to realy understand linux, not to be an simply user, like an windoze user.
Gentoo is not for diletants.
Enyway is the best. I've tried all major distro's, including Slack, but Gentoo is the best.
Is hard to understand, what is a kernel compiled for a specific configuration, but any real linux user can tell you that is the essential in stability, reliability, maintenance (portage is a great concept) etc. of a operating system.

Full disclosure: am a gentoo user since Gentoo 1.4, I have installed and used SuSE, Mandrake (pre-Mandriva), and Libranet Linux before switching to Gentoo, and I have yet to find a distro to replace it. I have never fully installed or used Slackware to any degree, so I cannot relate to Slackware users' love of this distro.

I can, however, understand how one can fall in love with a distro (even with all of its quirks) and have a hard time getting their mind around how another distro does its thing. Loyalty can very easily get in the way of objectivity, and I believe this reviewer suffers from this.

Gentoo is a distro that requires commitment. I have installed and re-installed Gentoo about 3 times since v1.4, and each time the installation and subsequent maintenance of the system has been a wonderful learning experience which has enhanced my understanding of how Linux (and, granted, Gentoo) works. Much of what I have learned I believe I could transfer to other distros, but each one has its own way of doing things, and that is their prerogative. I would not recommend Gentoo to anyone who does not have patience or a willingness to learn the 'Gentoo way.' My motivation for using Gentoo was that I am a control and detail freak who loves to be on the semi-bleeding edge. Gentoo's way fits my way, so I'm happy.

Gentoo is not without its problems, though. Sometimes even packages marked as 'stable' break certain things, but a fix is usually only a forums visit away, and the fix usually makes it into portage in short order. The distor is under aggressive development, so those who want production stability should steer clear. That said, I have never had a problem that I could not solve by visiting the Gentoo forums or reading the docs, and in every case I've been glad to learn how things broke so I can know how to fix them should the issue come up again.

I believe what the review highlighted was that those who have built up their loyalty to a particular distro and/or have no patience to learn should not try Gentoo. To each his own (which is the beauty of FOSS). ;-)

The error in your logic is you are faulting Gentoo for not being something that it doesn't intend to be.
Gentoo is not about getting a quickly build and setup environment. Its about customization.

Comparing a source based disto to any one using any pre-compiled packages is also faulty.

So you don't what gtk features compiled, so you set USE="-gtk".
Under any ./configure ; make ; make install distro you would have to pass the appropriate configure option to disable to each package.

I could care less what distro you use, but too many of your arguments were completely flawed or wrong.

For example, you complain about Gentoo having a custom nvidia driver ebuild and not using the run file provided by Nvidia. The ebuild is simply a wrapper around the same file from Nvidia that makes sure you have the needed kernel options compiled and applies several patches that you would otherwise have to try to patch yourself. These aren't gentoo specific patches either, and fix many problems many people would have without them.

The error in your logic is you are faulting Gentoo for not being something that it doesn't intend to be.
Gentoo is not about getting a quickly build and setup environment. Its about customization.

Comparing a source based disto to any one using any pre-compiled packages is also faulty.

So you don't what gtk features compiled, so you set USE="-gtk".
Under any ./configure ; make ; make install distro you would have to pass the appropriate configure option to disable to each package.

I could care less what distro you use, but too many of your arguments were completely flawed or wrong.

For example, you complain about Gentoo having a custom nvidia driver ebuild and not using the run file provided by Nvidia. The ebuild is simply a wrapper around the same file from Nvidia that makes sure you have the needed kernel options compiled and applies several patches that you would otherwise have to try to patch yourself. These aren't gentoo specific patches either, and fix many problems many people would have without them.

I have used many distro in my day. I started out with Slackware and I used it for over 3 years. It was a great learning tool. Then one day I read about Gentoo, and how it was suppose to be an excellent tool for learning about the inner workings of a GNU/Linux system. So I thought what the hell, I'll give it a shot. Maybe I'll learn something new that Slackware hasn't shown me already.

So I downloaded Gentoo 1.4 (this was the version, back when I started using it) It was indeed a great learning tool, mostly due to the handbook giving a bit of background information about each command along the way. BUT! The second time around I'm not learning anything new... in fact it's just becoming a pain to get a Gentoo system up and running quickly, even with a stage3 install. I can do it all under 45mins now, but I still find it more of a pain then anything else really. So I stopped using it.

Since I was in the market I went distro hunting again. I stumbled around in Freebsd (great, just great. Wish gentoo had a similar way of installing) Then moved to and settled on Debian since. (I tried ArchLinux, which is also really great)

As I see it. Gentoo is a great learning tool and will always be, but for someone like me who needs to get systems up and running quickly and painlessly Slackware/Debian/Freebsd/Arch are all better options. They give me just as much flexability (minus USE Flags, which are nice to have sometimes) as Gentoo, but in half the time.

Use the right tool for the job. They all provide great package managers, stability and flexability. It's just how quickly you get can it up and running that defines when and where I will deploy each.

...this was still a really poorly written article. I agree with the author's conclusion that Gentoo requires a time investment that does not pay off; I've spent some time playing with it, and I found that while I didn't /learn/ significantly more about Linux than I have in playing with other distributions, I did have to spend a /lot/ more time getting things working. I'm not talking specifically of time reading documentation, although this certainly counted, and I agree with the author that reading this documentation primarily teaches one about Gentoo, and not about Linux. Which is fine for some, but I'm interested in Linux, not necessarily a specific distro. But the real time investment is just with waiting for things to happen. If I wanted to install a program, I would "emerge app", and then walk away for anything between a few minutes and a few hours. This essentially meant that I had to plan in advance any app that I'd need; and if I needed something quickly, I was sol.

I tried FreeBSD as well, which had a similar problem, but at the same time I felt like BSD was the real OS that Gentoo was trying to be in its approach. I just got the feeling that Gentoo was rice; there was no real benefit to all the emerge stuff, all the compiling from source, all the "optimizations". I never noticed Gentoo running faster, and if I can't notice it, I don't care about it. None of this is said to disparage Gentoo; I have no problem with people using Gentoo, and I know that many people swear by it. Their needs are just different to mine. I use Ubuntu at the moment, for a number of reasons, one of which is that the speed of installing programs is much greater. I like Ubuntu a lot and it fits the bill for me, but people who use Gentoo will probably raise all sorts of complaints, which are quite valid if you're doing the things they're doing.

All that said, the author of this article is just a dolt. When I installed Gentoo, I understood that it was going to be a major undertaking, involving a steep learning curve. I sat down several days in advance and read through the entire install guide, and a lot of extraneous documentation, so that I had an idea of what I would need to do, and of possible problems I'd run into. I had the documentation handy during and after the install, and relied on it heavily. And when I wanted to uninstall something, I didn't assume that "unmerge" was the command; I assumed that emerge, being the package management tool, would have an uninstallation option, and I typed "man emerge" to find out what it was.

At this stage, I was a complete amateur with Gentoo, so I feel I can safely say that the author of this article is worse than an amateur. Given that he has apparently tried so many distros, and seems to have been using Linux for a quite a while, the problems he had are purely his own fault. Complaining about there being no "unmerge" command, for example, seems to indicate a fundamental lack of understanding of what emerge is; and you'd think that an experienced Linux user would understand this implicitly.

All in all, a sad effort. What purpose was there in posting this article here, apart from to spark controversy and embarrass the author?

Getting sick of this "Just Works" crap. Nothing just works. If it just works now it won't later on. Seriously, I don't want to hear it anymore. Computers don't just work. Some people need to learn how to read and learn how to use things properly otherwise fix it yourselves.

you should remove the distributer or fuel injection on your can and install a dynamo handcrank instead.

you should also remove all gas powered appliances and cook over fire.

The next time you use a cellphone, beat yourself over the head with it--you're a caveman. The rest of the planet is moving to GUI interfaces for EVERYTHING THAT AN END USER MIGHT HAVE TO INTERFACE WITH.

Installing packages should be as easy as picking what candy I want out of a vending machine. You say COMPILING IS TEH FASTER: Show me benchmarks that show compiling your system gives you a more than 10% gain before you begin spouting "it feels faster." It feels faster because you haven't installed any apps on it yet.

The DAY Gentoo gets a GUI installer (even if it still compiles from source) will be the day people like you stop using it and begin to use, maybe BYFS since that too has a CLI installer that is utter crap.

Labor saving devices like computers sound like they take the "fun" [work] out of day to day tasks, I suggest you go back to using an abacus and slide-rule.

I would like to know why you think Gentoo shouldn't be allowed to exist. I mean, there does seem to be SOME sort of market for a highly customizeable, tuneable Linux system. There ARE people who use it.

It's definitely not for people who don't want to have to poke around in .config files though. Gentoo is designed for the other side of 'just works', which is 'works the way I want it to'. And yes, getting that set up takes a heck of a lot of time. That's why I switched to Ubuntu after a year of using Gentoo. I don't see this as a flaw with Gentoo; Gentoo does what it's supposed to (give or take). I just didn't like it any more.

There's a "quick start" version of the installation docs, just giving the basic commands with a few sentaces.

Also Gentoo is more about tailoring coding to a Gentoo format. This is why you have ebuilds that enforce proper File System Hiarchary rules and special scripts for managing init.d scripts. The excess of Documentation is a great thing for Gentooists, as we need to know exactly how things must be configured, because we love to administrate the system.

Slackware is different but still similar to Gentoo. With Slackware you get preconfigured precompiled tgz to work with and a few tools to manage your system. The rest of the stuff in Slackware is left for you to edit. It's very normal for users to configuer their own kernel in both Gentoo and Slackware, although some people love to use genkernel.

Gentoo really isn't that much different in philosophy to other distros, that is having a large system for managing and enforcing a certain style of distribution. One of the big downsides I see with Gentoo is the compile times and a lack of an automated install tool.

The posters here do not realize what "distribution" means. FreeBSD/Debian/Redhat/Slackware are not THE GOLDEN STANDARD. Just their own take on things, and why are you even bringing up FreeBSD, this article is about Linux derived distros. Although Slackware and FreeBSD hold alot of system design similarities. So realize that each distro is designed in a specific manner, some made well, some unmaintained, some exactly what "you" require. To each their own.

This article is as humorous as some of the responses. Gentoo is not as difficult as the author makes it out to be. I have run Gentoo since 1.2. The only distros I had messed with previous to that was Mandrake & Redhat (pre-Fedora 7.0 & up). I didn't know how to mount a drive back then. I had no clue what fstab was. I damn sure never had built X before. Gentoo built regardless. I learned copying and pasting commands directly out of the install guide into a terminal really wasn't rocket science.

Yeah, it was about ricing in those days. It's gone way beyond that since. Now, it's about customization & building exactly what you want how you want. It's about installing "unstable" compilers months ago without so much as a hiccup since. It's about ease of installation of things like KDE-pertty. It's about easy manual compiles of things like SimpleKDE, which aren't yet in portage, since you have a full development environment at all times. It's about installing the bits & pieces of KDE you actually use, like with Debian, rather than monolithic kde packages, such as kdenetwork or kdemultimedia, as is the case with Slack or Arch. (Or that was the case last I checked those distros.)

If you prefer the convenience of binary distros, it really is best to stick with them. If, on the other hand, you want a bit more control without having to track down dependencies, and don't mind doing larger compiles such as X or KDE overnight, portage does the job quite well.

Ok first off stop taking all of these comments so personally. I can tell that you are a Gentoo user and thats all fine and good, but don't take any of these people comments and opinions toward Gentoo so seriously. If someone is incorrect about something regarding Gentoo by all means CORRECT them, but don't get all pissy about it.

The reason by Freebsd was even brought up was because of its obvious simularities. Especially portage being based on ports. I brought it up earlier because my only complaint about Gentoo was the lack of installer. But due to its lack of installer it makes a great learning tool. But again, I don't need to constantly relearn how to install it when I've done it once before... so I brought up Freebsd because I felt it took a better approach to making itself a little easier (speed wise, thats all) in regards to installing.

Gentoo is a fine distro. I don't however agree with users pushing speed as one of its selling points. USE flags and portage are the selling points. The ability to be a ricer is not a selling point. It never was. Most veterian Gentoo users know this and will agree with me. The only people who push this kind of crap onto the public are the inexperienced "l33t" users who say things like "omgz0rz -omg-optimize setting for gcc speeds things up like crazy".

Gentoo is a developers dream platform. I love it, but I don't have time to install it on my systems. I can get the same with systems that share simularities such as Debian/Freebsd/Arch/Slackware.

Oh, and one other thing, those distros aren't the GOLDEN STANDARD, but they are highly used and well known (not so much Arch, unfortunately) that is why they are often refered to.

In closing, don't take these comments so personally. I could care less what distro you're using, because after all Linux is Linux, I mean GNU/Linux.

Gentoo is not supposed to be a turn key system, you are supposed to manually configure every aspect of the system (that is it's selling point and it's downfall). Upon completion of all the configuration you have a almost 100% hands off system.

Slack on the other hand is a turn key distro

nothing wrong with either but... they have different target audiences.

I personally use Gentoo, not because I think it is the best distro, but because 1.) I know it, and 2.) in my experience it has the best 64 bit support of any linux distro.

just my experience, anyway, not flaming, I just don't think it's a fair comparison

Stage 1 install does take a loooong time. Alsa and some other modprobes were failing but the alsa-driver package was fine if of course I had not compiled the kernel with Alsa support. Sound was a bit of a mess and coming from someone using Ubuntu that is a bit of a dig I know.

I knew I had to read docs and I knew about the USE Flag but omg you better get all the case dependencies like multi-media libs and all that out of the way in your use flags first before compiling even the basics like your desktop in my humble opinion. It was honestly tough to get the desktop just right without doing that.

Its not the kernel or the base system that takes so long but the entire gnome or kde desktop.

On a stage 1, that takes forever and then a day.

Personally after not having a 3 line USE flag set and after not getting my ALSA the way I want it and still getting apps telling me my /dev/dsp was locked and all that I was facing a huge re-compile on a deep dependency emerge world and just said screw it.

I tried out Breezy the developer's release of Ubuntu and life has not been perfect at all since it is a development release.

But I will give it to Gentoo, it really is a hell of a lot faster if you can get everything compiled against all the proper USE flags.

I've tried gentoo - it works, it installed nicely, but I still went back to Slackware - gentoo was just too much of a hassle and the speed bennefit was close to (or actually) NILL.
Can't be bothered to spend days on that again when Slack installs in 30min and just works.

i was a new one two years ago. back from an absurd system i tried linux an i did install lots of them! all those majors. well i tried gentoo and failed but then - months later i did 'linux from scratch'. a hard week of work and a hard week of insults from my girl but i did manage it. it was nice and not nice either. so it was time for gentoo - again. on my power pc. and yes. i m using it for more than a year now. it s impressive and realy nice. i love it. but guess what? ubuntu appeared. it s also amazing but i stay with gentoo! cheers, ame

I don't know what this guy is smoking, the gentoo docs are some of the best I've ever read. They practically hold your hand going through an entire install, explaining every step of the way. They aren't hidden either. Why did he have to use google to find the documentation? Theres a link at the top of the gentoo page clearly labeled "docs". There is clearly an "installation related" docs section and at the top of the installation section is a link to the handbook. How hard is that? Seems pretty logical and clear to me.

He obviously did not do any research about the gentoo distribution before he started because he seems to expect a completely built system with bells and whistles after chrooting into his new environment. Gentoo is about choice and deciding what exactly is installed, including choice of desktop environment. Gentoo does not make any assumptions about the user's tastes which is the great thing about it. If he's going to try gentoo, he should at least put some effort into reading the documentation and understanding what gentoo is all about instead of showing his ignorance.

I have also been a Slacker for a fair number of years, currently a Gentoo user. Even with Gentoo's installation instructions, the distro suceeded in kicking my ass for the first time (this was around the time of release 2004.1). Recently I tried again (with 2005.1) and won.

I must say, overall, I am happier with Gentoo. By using it, I need to have a much more intimate knowlege of the underworkings on Linux that I never really had to deal with before (while Slackware keeps things clean, generally, many things are added to save you headaches). By having myself do all the choices, I've created a more streamlined operating system which I am not finding is replacing my aging MacOS X box.

When I have the power to compile things as needed, Gentoo overall has now become my preferred distro of choice. I can make a system as complex or as simple as it needs to be, everything done is done by my own hands, I do not have to second-guess anyone else's work. Emerge is a godsend.

However, when it comes to lower-end hardware, in which I must run a server on some moderately old (266Mhz) and ancient (75Mhz) hardware, a binary-based distro that has a minimal installer and minimal add-ons like Slackware shines brightly.

But hey, this is just my personal experience based upon my personal opinions. You cannot, however, make a decision without experiementation. What works for you may not work for me, and what works for me, may not for you. Gentoo and Slackware are both nice, but have a look at some of the other distros out there.

Self disclosure - I am a Gentoo user after moving from Mandrake and Red Hat years ago.

I've used Gentoo since 1.2. The downside of Gentoo is that it does take time - but the amount of customization is good for a tweaker.

USE flags are incredible. For example, by adding the +wifi flag I get to include many wifi utilities (for KDE and other packages) for my laptop, whereas this is disabled for my desktop which just have a 10/100 network card. Granted I can enable that for each packages with --enable_something when I call ./configure - but having it done for you after just setting a flag is a handy thing. Updating the USE flags and recompiling in new functions just requires emerge --newuse world

Also, as others have mentioned, Gentoo has a a nice package system in Portage. Unstable can be installed with just 'ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge blah' for non-hard-masked packages.

The best part I have discovered in recent years is that Gentoo even has dependency fix tools. "revdep-rebuild" allows Gentoo to check the system for broken dependencies and suggest how things can be recompiled to make things right. I don't recall this functionality in another other distros I used.

The last good part about Gentoo is the continuing updates instead of a big-bang update like most other distros. Stage 1 is a pain but big compiles after that does not occur so often. Especially if one does not update every on every near minor release of KDE or Gnome when they come out.

...the possibility that Gentoo is not a distro for people like you? Gentoo is designed to be built from the ground up, piece by piece, the way you build a model airplane. There is nothing there but what you decide to install and configure and *that is the beauty of it*.

This is a distro where you are *supposed* to do everything yourself instead of getting it all prepackaged and set up for you. No wonder you were disappointed -- you expected it to be a flashy funky toy and instead you got a bunch parts and a manual.

Your disappointment is not Gentoo's fault. It's your own stupidity for expecting it to be what it isn't.

I'm surprised something this devoid of intelligence makes it to OSNews.

The worst part of Gentoo is the installation. Yes, you have to read the documentation. Yes, you have to do a lot of typing. Yes, it takes time. Yes, its tedious and as much fun as watching paint dry.

Once you're done with the installation - which you pretty much only have to ever do *once* on any given hardware, since Gentoo is one of the easiest distros to keep current - you start to get the benefits of Gentoo.

What benefits exactly? Speed is a minor benefit, if that matters to you. Slackware is no slouch by any means, but Gentoo is as quick or quicker, depending obviously on what you installed on your system. The only other Linux with anything close to the same pool of easily installed software - Debian - runs like a tired slug on a ball-and-chain by comparison.

The real benefit IS portage. Desite *years* of trying, I have yet to find any other Linux distro which lets me get as many differing bits of software easily installed, with one command, from mainstream items like KDE to oddball things like Qcad or Xcircuit or Kile or FlightGear.

The Gentoo install is purgatory. After that, it's as close to heaven as you'll get with Linux today, if you have the need for diverse uncommon bits of software.

If all you want is an excellent workaday desktop Linux, with all the run-of-the-mill browsing/office/email/chat programs and so on, by all means install Mepis, or Kubuntu if your tastes run that way. A quick install, and no need to go through the Gentoo install headaches. The Gentoo Portage advantage wouldn't be worth the install headaches for you, anyway.

Why do osnews has to publish this kind of stories in the first place ?
its crap, no info, no review, nothing. plain anti-gentoo and pro slack advertisement. Well, super!
Can I make one because I don't like ubuntu too ? Its good prolly but I don't like it..

Its a troll, flame, whatever you want to call it.
We should have a button to vote "DELETE THIS STORY" and it would be fixed up in 15min after you got 1000 "deletion votes"

Dont you just love it when a prefab linux users tries Gentoo, doesnt get the instructions, moans about the compile time, misses the point and just ends up looking like a f00l who tried to rocket jump with 2% health.

After bootstrapping the Gentoo build system, all I did was type "emerge kde". I got a modern Xorg based system with latest KDE installed. Perfect. I have no idea what the person in the article did and why that didn't work.

I must say that Gentoo IMNSHO is great! I've tried almost all the modern distro. But I wasn't in comfort with "of the shelf" products. So I did some fun with LFS project. But Gentoo came to be the distro of choice. Now I just don't want any other distro.
Even on my "not so new" box it runs whole lot faster than any other Fedora, RedHat or SuSe.
But the choice is yours!

he didnt bother to read the docs.
didnt bother to know what even stage 1 is...
didnt bother to read portage or the power of it.
he hated gentoo even before using it, just because he has to do some reading.
and guess what gentoo's main concern is optimisation.
if you dont want to optimise and know what you got on your system and you dont want to read docs that are REALLY easy to find on the main site.
I can say...go use windows...you dont even deserve to use slack.

OSnews is a OK website, but it could use some quality control once in a while. Do you have to rely on poorly written, badly researched rants to fill space? Does someone have a gun to your head if you don't?

I learnt nothing from that article, other than the Gentoo documentation was difficult to find. Which is strange, as many contributors seem to have provided links. At least this had some purpose.

If you like slackware then great... so do/did I. I have an original Que Publishing CD with slack 1.0 afterall. However, you went about installing Gentoo the wrong way, failed to properly read documentation and use the community resources, and what is worse... admit it openly and publicly. Moreover, USE flags are not Gentoo only and they are as relevant in Slack, even more so than any other mainstream Distro except for Gentoo, and... well do I really need to go on.

Chalk this one up to a user with that took the Fedora User approach to installing Gentoo.

Firstly, let me say that of late, portage has been getting a little finicky lately, mostly to do with ebuilds and awk issues. I attribute this to some slacking off in the Gentoo developers' department. There can be no excuse for this.
Still, this guy obviously does not know what he's talking about. He's got a Centrino laptop, and wtf, he wants to install nVidia drivers? Whining about TWM being ugly? What did he expect, everything to be installed already? It's a source distro, for god's sake!
and "emerge kde" is the way you're supposed to do it. Not "emerge kde-somethingorother".
Take your time and read the documentation carefully. Gentoo has the best documentation of anything out there, ever. Period. It even has a wiki, and unlike most wikis, gentoo-wiki.com actually has information.

This just reminds of the million other articles where a linux user tries to use Windows for some unknown reason.

I have not even read the article do to the fact that these replys have pretty much explained it to me....

Did he even have a PURPOSE for trying to use Gentoo? Jesus...

I am new to linux, and I have tried about 20 different distros over the summer and into this school year(thank you distrowatch.com) and when I tried gentoo, I found it to advanced for me, and I did not need the control and power during installation that makes it so great for people.

But at least I GOT IT WORKING. Loser, and I did it in one night, on a compaq laptop, while doing some HW. I am only 17 and did I mention I was really new to linux. The documentation was good enough for me.

I really do believe the goal was to rant on Slackware or something. Maybe he was told to get an article out and he had nothing so he decided to BS his way out.

I've had experiences with most of the mainstream distributions and I chanced upon Gentoo when a friend of mine bugged me to try it. At that point of trying, I was still a relative newbie to be installing such a distribution. I did it, I managed it, I learnt alot from it. If some of my other friends who aren't all that new with Linux CAN manage to install Gentoo by reading the handbook and asking in the gentoo help channels, why can't you being a long time linux user even install it? It all comes down to what I see as, you can't be bothered to read the documentation. Gentoo has one of the most extensive documentations around and just by following it and typing almost word for word, you can get it running. Poorly written article in my opinion.

Sorry for this, but I couldn't resist :-)))))
/ he just asked for it :lol: /

Now, how many times does it need to be said: Gentoo is a Linux METADISTRIBUTION. It's just a bunch of tools to create your own version of Linux. Unique.

It's just not for everyone. Tinkerers welcome.
And for "it-should-better-work-out-of-the-box" people: please, by the God's sake, please find yourself ANOTHER distribution. Please? Pretty please?

Maybe it should be stated at the very beginning of the Gentoo docs. In big, red letters (sorry for screaming):

WARNING:
IF YOU USE GENTOO, BE PREPARED THAT HOW THIS SYSTEM IS GOING TO WORK IS COMPLETELY UP TO YOU. IT REFLECTS A LOT OF ITS USER'S SKILLS AND WILLINGNESS TO DEAL WITH THE SYSTEM'S INNER WORKINGS.

In other words: if you really want to LEARN and FIX problems that WILL arise, then use Gentoo. If you want someone else (developers, distributor) to do all the dirty work like compiling, configuring and setting the defaults, do yourself a favor and use a prepackaged, polished, ready-to-use distribution.

This way you'll save yourself a bit of disappointment and save Gentoo users from your rants.

And starting with a stage1 instead of stage3 is really a dumb idea. You'll wait unnecessarily long, and the end result will be REALLY no better than stage1.

// If anyone read up to this place, then big tkans
// for your attention!

Don't get me wrong Slackware is a great distribution. I just don't see how you had a hard time with the documentation. Did you read it? I everything is laid out in categories and is very clear and if its not in the DOCS you go to the forum. As for the way to unmerge a package the command is "emerge -C package". If you looked at the man page you would find this out. I have installed Gentoo numerous times and never had these problems even on the first go round back before Gentoo 1.4. RTFM First!!

since when are all distros supposed to be the same? every distro ive tried (even distros based on each other) have had huge differences.

how unique is the following to gentoo?

-fdisk to chop up a drive
-extracting some sort of image into the root partition
-chrooting
-compiling a kernel
-choosing a boot loader

yes, there are little steps in between that are very gentoo (like emerge or rc-update) but the bigger picture is VERY linux. if you blindly go through the install, you learn nothing. if you take the time to understand what youre doing at each step and why, youll learn plenty.

The author just doesn't know how to read documentation, and use words like 'crap'. What is a 'crap' when it's your fault not using what is provided?

Not all systems work on the initial install? Well Gentoo is a distro that does not install as much at first, giving you control to what goes in your system. And if you read documentation or use forum and you will find specific package you need.

It's really disappointing author points out like 'unmerge app' was not in Gentoo command... This is sort of waste of time to read such prejudice view of one person.

And what is wrong with 'emerge kde'? Unless he didn't want a complete KDE, which it sounded like what he wanted, should just use separate packages. Just using 'emerge -s string' will give you a list of packages with 'string' contained. What's the big deal?

Gentoo takes time, because it needs to compile and that is the strong point of it. If you don't like it, there's plenty other distro to go by. It's really once again sad that his Slackware makes KDE installed within 40 minutes saying Gentoo took 3 days... It's because you are on your first Gentoo use and the big difference in compile and pre compiled binary install is very obvious. What a joke.

From my point of view, Gentoo also 'just works' and if you use documentation and forum.

I had a feeling using UNIX nowadays require you to use documentation, google, forum, irc, whatever is possible with your effort to get it running, because it's targetted for advanced users and it is complex. If you are very reluctant finding documentation, use distro that doesn't require you to do so much or Windows seriously.

'countless other Gentoo "optimizations."' Wow there...
Where did you read you have to tweak million settings to make you feel good? I just put my own USE flag and just a line of optimization nothing more.

'I just couldn't stand to learn Gentoo when what I want is to use Linux. '

The only Gentoo specific environment you should learn is the install softwares including use of USE flags, of course same goes to any distro, how to update system, yet again same goes to any distro. And maybe you should know how to add services that start on boot and stop/start services. For others, like software configuration, they are all dependent on the software's configuration. So I don't know where this author had the impression he was all up against Gentoo not on Unix. I'd have that impression if I was using more GUI centered distro.

This review was way out of point with lack of effort. If you don't like Gentoo, good, but don't bring your comment(review) in the public because without doing the right work. It's like a programmer on his first day whining programming sucks because it's hard.

Gentoo is definately not a distro for people who are used to having an installer, or people who do not like to read documentation. The Gentoo docs are the best I have ever seen, and if followed to the letter, a successfull install almost always results. Yes, Gentoo requires tweaking after getting the base system installed, so what? Gentoo is a tweaker's distro - for someone who has used GNU/Linux for so long, that should have been apparent. Don't go swimming and then complain about getting wet - it goes with the territory.